Years ago, Americans were self-sufficient

I reflect back to the late 1930s in New­ Hampshire where my best buddy's house, like many in that rural area, didn't have electricity, phone, indoor plumbing or an automobile.

The house was heated with a wood stove in the kitchen and a pot-belly wood stove in the living room (heat for the bedrooms upstairs drifted up from downstairs). The lights were kerosene lamps; there was an outdoor outhouse; and water came from a hand pump in the kitchen sink, fed from a hand-dug shallow well. The pump was primed using a pitcher of water kept at the sink for that purpose — God help the person who didn't refill that pitcher after using it. His mother was raising nine kids without a father; my buddy was the oldest sibling at 16 years.

Each summer, I would help him cut, split and stack at least nine cords of stove wood for their stoves. Somehow they lived, survived and enjoyed life without a car, phone, radio or central plumbing — and obviously without TV, cellphones, iPads, radio or countless entitlements. Nobody robbed them, nor did they rob anybody. In those days, we didn't even lock the front or back doors.

There weren't any food stamps, Welfare, heating allowances, extended unemployment benefits — and this was the height of the Great Depression. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?

With all of today's entitlements and government handouts, more than 50 percent of our adult population's members are so unhappy that they voted to cast aside our freedom and embrace a socialist-communist form of governance.